Friday, 25 May 2012

Mega Mecha Monkey Masterclass, PLUS Recent Rovings Round-Up!

This week's Phoenix Comic is out today, and it features the first of Art Monkey's brand-new MEGA MONKEY MASTERCLASSES - comic strips where the sketching simian has started a comic but left it up to YOU the reader to finish off the salient details! Check it out in this week's Phoenix - available from these fine vendors - and you can download a big version of the strip as an activity sheet, FOR FREE, from Art Monkey's page on the Phoenix website.

Along with, indeed, ALL the previous Art Monkey activity sheets! We're up to 17 now and believe me, there's loooooaaaaads more to come. Look, here are a few:

Get sketching and you, YES YOU could be the proud recipient of Art Monkey's Top Banana Award! Which looks a little something like THIS:

Hey, while I'm here: I've done a couple of workshops in recent weeks and completely failed to blog about them, so I'd just like to say a big thank you to Buff Baughan and Tam Weaver at Storyfest in Hartfield, where I recently spent a glorious sunny day in a beautiful village teaching a bunch of awesome kids how to make comics. And got JAM. And also to Judith Merryat Team V and Rachel Smith of Oxford's Natural History Museum for inviting me along and making me so welcome doing some recent workshops at the museum. (Said museum is genuinely one of my favourite places on Earth, so it really was a thrill to get to hang out there and teach kids about drawing and making up characters amongst many of the very artefacts that inspired my work on Pirates of Pangaea.)

Look, here I am with one of the groups. YEAH. UNDERNEATH A T-REX.

And here is some of the absolute nonsense we were making up...

For a half-dinosaur half-Mr Bean likeness drawn from memory of what Rowan Atkinson looks like, I have to say: I am pretty happy with that.

And a final thank you to Ross Fraser at the Phoenix who was a huge help at these events; organising, taking these photos, and folding post-it-notes really quite beautifully.

Lots more school and library workshops coming up over the summer which I will, no doubt, competely fail to blog about here. If you're a teacher / librarian / bookshop owner and would like me to come teach how to draw Dinosaur Rowan Atkinsons and suchlike, you can find some more information about my workshops on my website. Thanks!